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88 MELODRAMA
the February of 1862, following an autumn season in New York, where it had been presented at Barnum's under the same roof as a real live hippopotamus. It was the very mildest of Faust stories. A doctor is granted all his heart's desires on condition that he does not cure patients wanted by the Angel, but when either his mother or his wife must be the next victim he appeals to heaven. The double-crossed Angel, before departing, gives him her blessing.
" Grecian " drama, though it owed much to France, took its stamp from the leading author's determination to be the leading actor and from his desire to reveal one or other of his two special powers. In pantomime both came into play. In melodrama one might be enough. Either he made a phantom night (which meant that he leapt, sprang or dived through star-traps in stage or scenery) or else he transformed himself into some surprising, unexpected, possibly unheard-of creature — on a visit to Wallack's he came a cropper while impersonating a twenty-five-foot worm. He was the most agile and inventive of actors. In the trap-door class there is Hand And Glove ; or, Page 13 Of The Black Book, by George Conquest and Paul Meritt, Grecian picture of contemporary London life in 1874. Conquest was Hand, a detective, who watches through a hole in the ceiling what his partner, Glove, is plotting with the poisonous Colonel Raven. There is a quarrel in the room below over some evidence that will prove who murdered a lady. When backs are turned, Hand harpoons the papers with a toastingfork, reads them and puts them back. The police arrive to arrest falsely-accused innocence in another room of this cross-section. Hand " comes through ceiling " like a little god-in-the-machine and puts things right.
In his expansive moments Paul Meritt, who was of Slav ancestry, told various picturesque but discrepant stories of his origins, claiming among other things descent from the Polish national hero Jan Sobieski. He was a clerk in a carpet warehouse until stage-fever took him to the Grecian, where he stood at " Exit " in the interval with pass-out checks for playgoers who wanted to drink at the Eagle. In this way he became the local dramatist, and an object of interest up and down the City Road because of the reedy falsetto voice which issued from his enormous bulk. " In and out the Eagle " was not his habit. Food was his failing. Even when the standing of a man-about-town was his for the asking he could not resist the eating-houses where he could buy pease pudding and then walk, picking it out of its paper, down the Strand. He took his stage name during his Grecian life, when his job was to string together accidents and offences, crimes and catastrophes, hero and heroine, persuasive and persuaded villains, and newly-married comics, before